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I'm not sure what you mean by "most of the research will fail". In my experience most (proper scientific) research succeeds eventually, both in the sense that i

I'm not sure what you mean by "most of the research will fail". In my experience most (proper scientific) research succeeds eventually, both in the sense that it (a) gives the authors something to write a paper about and (b) it adds something, however small, to the total accumulated store of human knowledge. I will say, though, that while reading a paper, or a book, or even going to a lecture, can be useful from time to time, just about everything I learned in my PhD and postdoc was learned from face-to-face conversation with people who knew more than I did. The internet can't replace that.

jballanc 17y ago
I'm not sure what you mean by "most of the research will fail". I've been working toward my Ph.D. for 7 years now. In that time, I've been involved in no fewer than 15 different research projects. Many of those made it a month or two before the results indicated that there was nothing interesting to be learned, and we moved on to the next problem. (The value of negative results is a topic for a different debate.) What I meant by my statement is that, if you took the research that a graduate student does in a lab at a university, and then had them do the same research in a lab in their basement (or some other isolated environment without peers and mentors), they wouldn't learn nearly as much as they do in the university setting. The specific research being done isn't as important as the setting in which it is done.
- psyklic 17y ago
  Questionable -- they would certainly learn different things if they did it in their basement. For example, so much in university is already set up for you -- constructing your own lab in your basement, calibrating machines, writing custom software to run experiments, etc. would be quite a learning experience. (I'm talking about experimental fields here.) But more importantly, in universities you are guided away from things that do not work usually without entirely understanding why. Through independent study, you would go down these incorrect paths and have a much richer understanding. Instead of doing things how everyone else does them, you'd gain new perspectives than the status quo, and this would give you a leg up. Of course, this all presumes that the student is extremely self motivated. Unfortunately, even at the graduate level these students are very rare. This is why some professors are very hands on and others are very hands off -- different students work best at different levels of independence.

jballanc 17y ago

I'm not sure what you mean by "most of the research will fail". I've been working toward my Ph.D. for 7 years now. In that time, I've been involved in no fewer than 15 different research projects. Many of those made it a month or two before the results indicated that there was nothing interesting to be learned, and we moved on to the next problem. (The value of negative results is a topic for a different debate.) What I meant by my statement is that, if you took the research that a graduate student does in a lab at a university, and then had them do the same research in a lab in their basement (or some other isolated environment without peers and mentors), they wouldn't learn nearly as much as they do in the university setting. The specific research being done isn't as important as the setting in which it is done.

psyklic 17y ago
Questionable -- they would certainly learn different things if they did it in their basement. For example, so much in university is already set up for you -- constructing your own lab in your basement, calibrating machines, writing custom software to run experiments, etc. would be quite a learning experience. (I'm talking about experimental fields here.) But more importantly, in universities you are guided away from things that do not work usually without entirely understanding why. Through independent study, you would go down these incorrect paths and have a much richer understanding. Instead of doing things how everyone else does them, you'd gain new perspectives than the status quo, and this would give you a leg up. Of course, this all presumes that the student is extremely self motivated. Unfortunately, even at the graduate level these students are very rare. This is why some professors are very hands on and others are very hands off -- different students work best at different levels of independence.